If there’s a single thing that keeps me working in design, it’s that moment when you look at something for the first time and it simply takes your breath away. That’s exactly what happened when I saw these beautiful Wind Paintings from artist Bob Verschueren. Verschueren worked in the 1970s and 80s using wind to create these stunning landscape pieces. Each work would focus on a material like iron oxide, yellow ochre or burnt umber, which was then laid out in linear patterns on the land. Verschueren would let the wind move and blow the pigments around and create an altered version of the shape that represented the stunning collaboration between man and nature. Though these pieces were created years ago, Tom at I Love Belgium is celebrating them on his fantastic blog and was kind enough to send them my way. Click here to check out more of Verschueren’s work online; it’s the sort of artwork that makes me want to throw this laptop aside and run outside. xo, grace

Hello, world! is a real installation for the virtual globe of the software Google
Earth. A Semacode measuring 160×160 metres was mown into a wheat field near the town of Ilmenau in the Land Thuringia. The code consists of 18×18 bright and dark squares producing decoded the phrase “Hello, world!”. The ambition was to have an areal view of the code integrated in Google Earths’ regular database. The project was realised in May 2006 and photographs were taken of it during a picture flight in the following month.

Almost a century ago and without the aid of any pixel-generating computer software, the itinerant photographer Arthur Mole (1889-1983) used his 11 x 14-inch view camera to stage a series of extraordinary mass photographic spectacles that choreographed living bodies into symbolic formations of religious and national community. In these mass ornaments, thousands of military troops and other groups were arranged artfully to form American patriotic symbols, emblems, and military insignia visible from a bird’s eye perspective. During World War I, these military formations came to serve as rallying points to support American involvement in the war and to ward off isolationist tendencies.

Living Portrait of President Woodrow Wilson, for which 21,000 troops assembled at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1918, is the best-known of Mole’s photographs. The image is characteristic of Mole’s work in that it wavers between the compositional effect of the whole (i.e. a portrait of Woodrow Wilson) and the desire to focus upon the obscured individuals who constitute the image, thereby undermining the optical illusion of the totality to a degree.

This kite from China and assembled in the U.S. flies at the Art in the Sky Kite Festival at the Stone Quarry Art Park near Cazenovia Saturday. The kite built from recycled plastic bags depicts 34 figures jumping rope. It was built by Yong Mao Huang of China visiting the area with theire daughter.

Water rocket demonstration by the author. The rocket itself was built by the author’s 6 year old son.

We begin with the derivation of the basic rocket equation, using of course conservation of momentum. We then add the external forces, and later continue with calculating the velocity of the ejected water. This is achieved by considering the adiabatic expansion of the gas trapped in the bottle, and the work it does to accelerate the ‘exhaust’.

Mind you, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to follow the derivation, through you do need first year university physics for it.